The Globalist

What will Putin’s legacy amount to? For starters, let us dispense with a giant "red herring" that too many Western commentators have pursued for far too long.

What I am referring to is the question of whether Putin is a “democratic reformer” -- or a “Soviet authoritarian.”

The answer, of course, is that Putin is an authoritarian reformer. He is profoundly committed to reforms intended to make Russia into a successful modern state. But at the same time,… more

Our meal with President Vladimir Putin took place at the presidential villa at Novo-Ogaryevo in 2006.

The drive to the presidential village was a short tour of the world of the new Russian elite -- which is now not so very new anymore, given the years that have passed since the Soviet collapse.

The road led through the former village of Zhukovka, now containing enormous villas -- some almost as large as that of the president.

We… more

The museum of the Khanti and Mansii tradition is intelligently and attractively designed, with vaguely New-Ageish references to Khanti and Mansii religion, but also genuinely interesting and informative about their beliefs.

Among these, following the Russian conquest of the 17th century, was a conflation of Jesus Christ with their traditional principal object of worship, the bear.

For anyone with a sense of Russian history, Khanti-Mansiisk has a certain heartbreaking quality. This was the dream of the Soviet reformers… more

Last autumn, I found myself by invitation of some very respectable investors in a high-class Moscow night-club shaped like an amphitheatre. The rake-thin, huge-eyed “models” perched in the tiers above me, and under the flashing strobe-lights, adopted in my inebriated imagination the forms of exquisitely beautiful, slightly predatory roosting birds.

My previous, sober after-dinner speech on Russia’s economic prospects to these international investors had been succeeded by a line of can-can dancers clad only in feathers and led by a… more

In contemplating a future world in which U.S. power is used more effectively, but in more limited ways -- indeed, more effectively because of these limits -- Americans can draw upon the example of British strategy in the century before 1914, when its global power was at its zenith.

This experience has been used by writers such as Niall Ferguson and Max Boot as an example for the exercise of American global power today and in the future.

Such recommendations… more

What has failed in Iraq has been not just the strategy of the administration of George W. Bush -- but a whole way of looking at the world.

This consists of the beliefs that the United States is both so powerful and so obviously good that it has the ability to spread democracy throughout the world; that if necessary, this can be achieved through war; that this mission can also be made to advance particular U.S. national interests -- and… more

Lind's new book, The American Way of Strategy, explores this issue in greater detail. Please click here for additional information.

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Theodore Roosevelt was in favor of it. So was his cousin Franklin -- and his rival Woodrow Wilson. “It” was an alliance or “concert” of peace-loving, law-abiding great powers that would cooperate to maintain international security.

Ending the cycle of world wars by establishing a great-power concert was the goal of Americans in World War I… more

The values of America's Yankee Puritans were forged in the religious and political conflicts of 16th- and 17th-century Britain. Puritan opposition to Catholicism and Anglicanism translates, among their descendants, into strong support for the separation of church and state.

Puritan values = New England values

The Puritan belief that the community of "saints" as well as the individual is a moral actor lives on in a strong sense of civic spirit and support for social reform. New Englanders were over-represented in… more

A grand strategy, such as it is pursued by the Bush Administration, ultimately rests on the simple idea of a unipolar world -- the notion that the United States is the only power that counts in the world today.

Coincidentally, that is also why neo-conservative advocates are so critical of France's avowed goal of creating a multi-polar world, attributing it to France's superpower "envy."

Yet for all practical purposes, a multipolar world already… more

There are three reasons to question the emphasis of a U.S. mission in the Middle East. The first relates to whether the United States can overcome the deep legacy of distrust -- and even hatred -- past U.S. policies have created in the region.

U.S. empire for the common good

Neo-conservatives in and around the Bush Administration like to believe the United States is a different kind of hegemonic power.

They assert that the country does not… more